One thing is for sure…British politics hasn’t been boring over the last 12 months. 2015 delivered a surprise Conservative majority. The referendum saw the people of this country demonstrate the will and courage to vote for their freedom from the evermore corrupt and authoritarian European Union. The 8th June saw a backlash against the wholly misjudged gamble of the Prime Minister. It was an election which delivered more questions than answers. In Thurrock both the 2015 and 2017 general elections and 2016 local elections demonstrated what a dynamic and fascinating political landscape we have in Thurrock. No Thurrock voter can possibly complain that they haven’t been offered real choice at the ballot box over the last two years.
I’m immensely proud of the campaign that we ran in Thurrock. It was executed like clockwork and focused on the issues that matter locally. Can I say how grateful I am to the 10,112 people who put their trust in Tim Aker to represent them in Westminster. I’ve never met anyone who works as hard as Tim has over the last two years. He has installed this ethic throughout the work we all do. He would have been, and may still be, a wonderful MP for Thurrock. The reason UKIP have achieved so much in Thurrock is that we do politics the right way. No other local party makes itself as open to residents as we do. No other local party has the level of contact with residents that we do. No other local party assists as many local residents as we do.
However, we lost… and lost badly… despite throwing the kitchen sink at this election. Despite canvassing more doors and delivering more leaflets than our opponents. Despite concentrating on the local issues that we know, from the huge amount of contact with residents we have, are most important to them. We polled a very respectable 20% however to be frank we weren’t even close. So that leaves us to ponder why our vote dropped 20% from the local elections last year. The easy answer is to assume that voters went to the polls to elect a government. They were voting in an attempt to get either May or Corbyn into 10 Downing Street. I’m sure that this did play a huge part but there’s something deeper at play and I believe we need to look closer at UKIP as a political party. I’d like to make it clear that this is a personal opinion piece. It’s my own personal analysis of the election and future of UKIP on a national level.
UKIP has put immigration to the top of the political agenda however again and again the way our party has communicated this has been crass, ill-judged and without the required nuance to avoid the party being painted as racist. Our opposition to the current levels and make-up of immigration into Britain have nothing to do with ethnicity at all. They are based on concerns about the oversupply of unskilled labour, the environmental impact of over-population, the ability of our infrastructure to cope with rapid population growth, security concerns and the societal attitudes of some of the people we are allowing into this country. Race doesn’t come into it and I know that this is the case with the vast majority of the members of UKIP.
Our office in Thurrock is a truly inclusive operation. I have personally completed over 1000 pieces of casework over the last two years since I joined the office. Within this figure residents from Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) communities make up around 20%. I know that my fellow councillors find similar proportions of BAME residents coming to them for help. However all too often when I canvass I am accused of being racist despite this record of delivering assistance to the BAME community. More than often these comments come from young white voters. In other instances, I’ve experienced being accused of being sexist or even homophobic. This is despite women making up 70% of the people I’ve assisted and the office being a strong supporter of gay marriage and LGBT rights.
As a party, we need to ask why this is the case and to tackle it head on. Simply blaming the media, and the propaganda spread by organisations such as Hope Not Hate every election time is a cop out. The party needs to take firm and unequivocal action, not simply statements to quash such allegations. If it doesn’t then we will continue fail to achieve success at a national level. However, time and time again, UKIP seems to make elementary mistakes in how it communicates reasonable concerns about immigration and cultural issues. These mistakes leave us open to criticism and millions of voters won’t even consider voting UKIP due to these concerns.
One example of this was our integration policy within our latest manifesto. There are valid concerns within the policy. For example, should we allow people into this country, whether they be non-religious or not, who believe that homosexuality should be a crime punishable by death? Of course we shouldn’t. However instead the presentation of policy was dragged into a discussion focusing on ‘what women wear’. There are no official statistics on how many people wear the Burka or Niqab in the UK however there are in both France and Germany. Using these figures, you can reasonably assume that around 1000 women are wearing them in the UK. I understand the feminist and integration argument against the Burka. However, an issue that affects so few women should be page 127 on a manifesto, if at all, not a headline policy. I myself, do not support a ban.
The real scandal in this country regarding integration, not just in Muslim communities, but also working class white and black communities, is youth mass unemployment. However, this barely got a mention within any of the press conferences about the policy. If people from any background are to integrate then they must have a chance of employment. In addition, the possibility of avoiding employment should be removed. I call on the next leader of UKIP to make the eradication of youth unemployment and related benefit reforms the centre piece of both our economic and integration policy. People can only fully integrate into the wealth of experiences our wonderful country can offer when they have a steady and adequate income. We now have urban underclass ghettos in nearly all of our major population centres often segregated along ethnic lines. They are breeding grounds for drug dependency, crime and radicalisation. This cycle must end. What better way could there be to prove that UKIP fights for all, regardless of race, than to put forward a plan to eradicate mass youth unemployment?
UKIP stands on the edge of an electoral precipice. Our results in this election were abysmal. We may not have won the election in Thurrock but we achieved almost double the share of the vote of any other constituency and were one of only two to even get into double figures. The electoral lessons from Thurrock, a diverse community, are there for anyone who wishes to examine them. We achieved almost 40% of the vote in last year’s local elections. There is no space on the right, the Tories have firmly occupied that space. The only chance the party has is to establish itself as the only centrist party which is committed to nation state democracy. UKIP must demonstrate that it is a party which is truly inclusive, which concentrates on the issues upon which voters actually decide who to vote on. These are the economy, health, housing, crime and the environment. We must be a business-friendly party but one that that ruthlessly fights corruption, fights cuts to our public services, and ensures employment prospects and a decent living for all. We must be socially liberal, the undisputed champion for freedom and liberty. This is a route I believe can deliver electoral success.
I would also question the wisdom of making culture a central part of any new leader’s policy platform. One the other main pledges in our broadcasts was ‘Protecting British Culture’. Voters may have opinions on this but this was not a statement that would have persuaded anyone to vote for us. For starters, what is British Culture? Britishness is not some homogeneous, one-size-fits all, state of being. It means entirely different things to different people with great variation across regional, class, gender, age and ethnic lines. Again, it was a waste of valuable messaging, so clunky that it left us exposed to the same old allegations and worried many voters who may have voted for us if we’d concentrated on some of the other great policies we have within our manifesto.
Getting into a discussion about internment during the election was a PR disaster for the party. Internment, or as it is more commonly known concentration camps, was the biggest recruiting device for the IRA in the entire history of the troubles. Some may wish to make a more reasoned approach by revisiting some of the aims of the 2006 Terrorism Act, I am not one of them. How can UKIP, a supposed anti-establishment party, even consider putting the power to lock up people without them even being charged of an offence in the hands of an establishment we so consistently deride. The same goes for torture and capital punishment? I don’t believe that any government in my lifetime has acted in the interests of us the citizens. I’ll be damned before I put the power of liberty, life and death in their hands.
Above all we need to set out an agenda that inspires people. A set of policies that gives people a sense of hope that we can deliver changes that will improve their lives. We need to put forward a programme that can stop the regression of living standards. Brexit will give this country the opportunity to get back on a path to economic, social and political progress. However, without a detailed and economically feasible plan to deliver progress we will continue to be seen as a one issue party. YouGov’s best party on issues polling demonstrates the scale of the task we face. Only 1% of respondents regarded UKIP as the best party to deal with the economy, NHS, education, and unemployment. Just 2% saw UKIP as the best party to deal with housing and taxation. As long as these numbers remain so alarmingly low UKIP will remain un-electable. With the party polling where it is at the moment Thurrock may be the only place we can win a borough council seat next year. Unless we elect a leader capable of addressing these issues immediately then we could find ourselves wiped off the political map. Many residents in Thurrock may have an opinion on ‘what women wear’ or Sharia law. However, they will not choose who to vote for on these issues.
Choose carefully who you vote to be the next leader of UKIP. If you make the wrong choice then they may be the last leader UKIP ever has. UKIP is seen by too many people as mean-spirited, reactionary, racist and authoritarian party. We need to change this perception and change it quickly.
This article by Luke Spillman was originally published on the Your Thurrock blog and is reproduced here with the permission of the author
The article misses the point on the overall election result. The campaign started to go wrong back in late 2015 when UKIP as it usually does reverted to type and concentrated on the next election in view, The team that ran the last two big by elections proved themselves to totally inept. The same people were then handed the GE to run. Its hard to pick out one of the strands as being at fault they all were from mixed messaging, launches press selection or imposition of candidates. All contributed and to be honest the excuse that people were electing may or corbyn is facile. UKIP failed to offer a coherent thought out alternative. It would not have changed the over all result but it would have produced more votes and better results. Last time we lost as many deposits as this time we saved. The actual team has virally no election experience and it was a classic example of giving people something to do when they had no idea of how to do it. Planning for the GE starts right after the GE not 5 weeks before hand.
Interesting thread. But I think there’s something which has barely been touched. Where’s the future for the kids? They’re not stupid all the time. And they can see their opportunities much reduced compared to ours 40 years ago or so. And yet all governments still refuse to tackle the big cost areas. NHS. Welfare. Pensions. And Debt.
79% of govt expenditure on those 4 alone, as we should know thanks to Anthony N.
We have seen all shades of govt since 1997. Lab, con/lib, con. And made nothing of it.
Hopeless Party organisation and hapless leader.
I hope Banks with Farage in any capacity creates a genuinely radical party. And finds room for ideas like JRE and yes, AMW. I think time is short, the May bug is already targeting internet freedom… albeit dressed as controlling terrorism that she can barely name.
But a genuinely radical party wouldn’t just look to the extremes for impact. Finding New money for the NHS for example. And breaking the welfare cycle. We’re already too far down the road of charging the haves, to find the can’t-be-arsed. Hence the huge reaction to the dementia tax which shouldn’t have been anywhere this election if she’d had half a brain cell engaged.
And interment? No way. Dear God. You can’t teach new dogs old tricks. But maybe a party will emerge from the wreckage that gives kids hope for the future. Cos it certainly looks bleak right now.
Once we have done the required amount of soul-searching, we need to properly decide what we are for, and what we believe. Constructive argument behind the scenes to determine these two points is fine & very healthy, but any such debate should remain behind the scenes (i.e. for party members consumption only) and not be waved around willy-nilly publicly.
Having done that, we then need to appoint a new leader (preferably Nigel) who is in sync with the above, and a professional team to back him up who are also singing from the same hymn sheet.
At that point, whilst there will be much else that needs doing, we should at least consider the following:
Recruit a professional, media-savvy team, working 7 days a week, that concentrates on nothing more than rebutting attacks on UKIP & its members/manifesto/policies/representatives.
As an extension of the above, recruit & maintain a suitable team to constantly drip feed UKIP messages/policy/corrections into social media.
Have a permanent ‘policy & manifesto’ team that literally keeps a full, but concise, manifesto running on a day-to-day basis. That way, there will always be a bang up to date, comprehensive manifesto & set of policies that can be published & referred to at a moments notice, and it will be one which takes into account public mood and reactions to unfolding events.
The above mentioned “manifesto team” should, however, always be subject to on-going scrutiny from the leader & his team, so as to make sure that nothing stupid, or contrary to our overall beliefs, is allowed to creep in unnoticed. The team should also take ideas from the membership at large and be prepared to develop those which have merit for submission the leadership.
Assume that there will always be the possibility of an election at any time, at short notice. Behave accordingly and adopt a permanent sate of readiness. That way we will not be caught with our pants down, like this time.
Forget trying to promote UKIP via seats on local councils. We are only really interested in politics at a national level. Messing about with the minutiae of very localised issues is not going to get us anywhere. It simply soaks up scarce resources, and likely causes us as much harm as good. It is also pretty much invisible. We should concern ourselves only with issues that affect us all as a nation and use our (limited) resources on only that which is visible from a national perspective. (Yes, I know that the local council route has proved effective for the LimpDims in the past, but we are not LimpDims and are not starting from the same place).
Whether or not you agree with any of the above – best to remember that we really are in last chance saloon!
‘The only chance the party has is to establish itself as the only centrist party which is committed to nation state democracy.’ Correct, tho it would be more accurate to say nether left nor right but common sense – and it does NOT mean having to accept sharia and all that goes with it. We do still have to fight for our country and true British culture.
‘There is no space on the right, the Tories have firmly occupied that space.’ Also correct. However much Mrs May tried to dilute the message, the Tories are still the party of markets, corporatism and austerity, and whilst that’s the case the electorate will always regard them as ‘on the right.’ There is no mileage in trying to outdo them, therefore we should be appealing to get the patriotic Labour vote, which many low- and middle-earning Tory voters would support too.
If only we had made radical moves on the economy, like nationalising the railways, then we would have forced the MSM to give us some attention, and people would have started to take notice of many other good policies in our manifesto. But no, Gary’s conventional rightwing formula put an end to that.
Our constitutional fixation with ‘low tax’ and ‘libertarianism’ has to change if we are to avoid oblivion – but then all parties evolve.
In my view the writer’s ‘personal opinion’ is completely misguided.
His centrist analysis and conclusions seem hopelessly wrong to me. After all, centrism directly led to the creation of the awful LibLabCon monster.
In fact, within the piece, I seem to detect an alarming undercurrent of the views espoused by ‘smiley face’ Carswell, ‘inclusivity and anti-homophobia’ Suzanne Evans, and ‘UKIP is toxic’ Vote Leave, who were all of course supported by Patrick O’Flynn and others.
For me, those ideas have been severely damaging to UKIP over recent years. Slogans are no substitute for policies.
I think It’s vital for the future of UKIP that the policies must continue to be radical, the leadership sticks to the party’s original core principles, and that the abysmal internal and public communications are rapidly and dramatically improved.
It’s unfair to immediately criticise this article as it represents one person’s attempts to come to grips with the situation we face. I went to Thurrock twice to help out, and I have to congratulate them first on having the best organised UKIP campaign I have ever seen. It was truly professional from top to bottom. And the issues that a party faces when it is actually close to winning an MP are different to those it faces when it is just winning a few hundred votes. You can say whatever you like in the latter case and stick to your principles, but in the former case when you have a real chance you have to be very careful. Paul got this balance wrong in Stoke but Thurrock got it right, but in my opinion were let down by the national party. My heart goes out to the team there including Tim and Jack Duffin as they set an example for all branches. Indeed, I am somewhat amazed that the party has never tried to share these best practices. Where are the ‘learn from Thurrock’ drives?
I am calling for an EGM of the members to make sure that it is the MEMBERS that decide the way forward. Whatever the next step is, it should be done with the full involvement of, and decision of, the MEMBERS, not the management or the NEC, they answer to us not the other way round. It is clear that the NEC fails to represent the membership and feels no duty of responsibility to us. Our opinion is never sought. I have an NEC member living about 10 miles away and this person never answers any of my emails or messages, never came to our branch, its like we don’t exist. The management also clearly failed in this election and I agree with the point about the 5 pledges printed on the back of our election addresses, the first four roughly translate into ‘we don’t like foreigners’. We didn’t even get the manifesto until 4 days before the election so all we had to go on was the integration agenda, more ‘we don’t like foreigners’. Guess what, as I went around the doorsteps in Thurrock there was some support for that (Thurrock had a lot of new immigrants from the Olympics resettlement and the new Amazon warehouse) but to the vast majority of people they were worried about the impact of austerity on their community. In Tilbury you can walk around a deserted town centre, fire station closed down, police station closed down, hospital never came, only pub closed, shops empty and boarded up. People want a hopeful economic message too.
There is a smart way to achieve your objectives and a ‘hit it on the head with a hammer’ way, even Labour have figured out how to present policies in an attractive way that will achieve their real intentions without ever having stated what they are.
Support my call for an EG on facebook here @EGM4UKIPNOW
“…the office being a strong supporter of gay marriage and LGBT rights.”
Controversial and divisive. Who decides/rules on whether or not things like this are right or wrong?
The establishment, political class assisted by vested interests is about to pull off the biggest deception in political history. We the people voted to leave the EU; we the people are going to be ignored or at best some half way house that embodies the worst of both worlds is about to be arranged. This should anger and if it doesn’t we are totally finished as a party and as a country. Standby for a surge in UKIP support. In the meantime we should be attacking the unelected messenger – the MSM and at the same time finding effective ways to get our message across.
John, it isn’t a case of ‘finding’ ways to get our message across, there are plenty of them out there – John Rees-Evans identified them and put forward how to implement using them BEFORE the last Leadership election. That his ideas were ignored shows the hubris that has been operating at the top.
The young are now bypassing, and in the main refusing to go on mainstream BBC programmes – good for them! They have resisted the ‘I’m on the tele’ because they know they will be talked down or over. We can still use them, but use social media to mock their failings in interviews, on alternative platforms. The trouble is, as someone says, that many, Er, more mature UKIPpers still live in the ‘old media’ days.
That is right and it is something that needs to be addressed, we do have “young independents” give this task to them to organise and police.
With respect, a deeply flawed analysis. UKIP could have fought these elections promising a cure for cancer, the media would still have smeared us as racist and the result would not have changed one iota.
UKIP’s problem is not about policies. If you white-labelled the 2015 or 2017 manifestos and gave them to a representative focus group, the policies therein would receive mass support, in some cases clear majority support. Nobody reading them would think they are racist.
The problem is that the mass of the voting public are unaware of UKIP policies. This is in part down to poor campaigns by the party leadership, but is largely because the majority of people get their information from the mainstream media, and the mainstream media hate UKIP. The only coverage they are willing to give UKIP is bad coverage. Put forward a coherent, costed manifesto covering everything from animal welfare to housing and the media simply will not give it air time.
The only policies that cut through were those that the media thought would actually damage us – the burka ban in particular. A UKIP without such policies would disappear entirely from the public consciousness.
I actually laughed out loud at the idea of the Tories having “firmly occupied” the right. The Tories can not reasonably be described as a right wing party. They have not been so for well over a decade. That they hoover up right of centre voters is simply because under our tribal FPTP electoral system those millions of people have nowhere else to go. Anyone who even glanced at the Tory manifesto would see that Ed Miliband would have been proud of it – the energy cap, the price fixing, the workers on boards, the tax and spend, the living beyond our national means…
The Tories have been centre ground for years. Theresa May took them further leftward and they just got hammered for it. People who like leftist rubbish rightly wonder why vote for Blue Labour when they can vote for the real thing, while the Tories’ natural right of centre audience are told to like it or lump it – the choice is centre left or far left. Too many decided to lump it, and without millions of UKIP voters holding their noses and voting Tory we would now have PM Corbyn. A right of centre, conservative Conservative party would have made mincemeat of the far-left Corbyn.
If UKIP moves left too, the party is dead. The right of British politics has been vacant for a decade or more because the political class, whatever their rosette colour, is centre left in their views. There are millions of people out there who support UKIP policy as outlined in the manifestos, they just don’t know it. There are millions more who would support a low tax, small government party big on individual freedoms and responsibilities. Brits are inherently distrustful of government and would like less of it (see EU vote).
There is no point trying to change UKIP to suit the media who will hate us whatever we do, or to chase voters who will never vote for us whatever we do. UKIP must get its act together, yes, preferably with a major rebrand and relaunch, but the fundamental position of the party on the political spectrum, as outlined in the constitution, is sound.
Spot on. We need a multi track approach: find ways to get our message across without the MSM (side line it); secondly we need to constantly challenge and disrupt the MSM’s biased output; replicate activities that Momentum use. These should now be the priorities of the party.
UKIP needs to work out what it exists to do – the party has lurched from local elections to byelections to General Elections and back again. In between times, we have been silent. Hopefully there will now be time enough to work out what it is that we actually want to achieve over, say, the next five years. The party will not be a significant electoral force in that time. At the ballot box we will be largely irrelevant. If there’s another election before 2022 there’s no reason to believe UKIP would do significantly better than it has just done. The choice will always be Labour or Tory, Brexit will be just one of many issues in play, and Leave voters will go for whichever one sounds least worst for Brexit.
Personally I’d like to see a total rebrand and relaunch. More of a movement than a political party as such. Spend a couple of years building support, run a few big campaigns independent of any elections that may or may not be coming over the horizon. Pointless spending all our time, energy and money on byelections we have no chance of winning. Better to relaunch with a set of core beliefs and policies, pick one at a time and spend a month or two hammering away consistently at that message. In other words, do our own thing, independent of the electoral landscape. But the party, or whatever it is, needs to get much better at supporting and motivating its ground troops.
Gary, I completely agree. It was going so well when UKIP were a movement, and then it got infiltrated with people who wanted to be loved and respected and prepare for Government. Since that happened we stopped being comfortable with where we were and have continually fought to decide whether we were left, right or a bit of both (Suzanne Evans) instead of being happy to be us, is my take on,where we, Frankly, aren’t, which is anywhere.
Brexit yes, though something tells me Arron Banks will shortly use his Leave.eu data base to form a Patriotic Alliance of Independent Brexiteers, if Brexit keeps getting watered down.
Let’s see what people are most worried about, that other parties won’t address. There is something…I can see it coming over the horizon trampling everything as it goes…Ah Yes, it’s an Allahfunt! Will UKIP be the Party that tries to de-tusk the Allahfunt, I wonder, or will that be too uncomfortable?
Remember the Spanish man in a video provided by someone on here a while back who said – We don’t want our children to think that we were too afraid to even try.
I agree but we need to sort out how we are going to get whatever message we want to push out to the real world. If we don’t address or manage the MSM for example, they will constantly undermine our message making it ineffective.
To be honest, to do something in the media then someone in the UK should copy the Alex Jones model, do an infowars UK and fund it by selling vitamins or whatever. The cause can be supported in multiple ways, not everything needs to go through UKIP.
John, I would hazard a guess that almost all of the between 3,500 and 5,000 people on the Manchester march the other day either have voted UKIP, Are ex UKIP, actual UKIP or are among the substantial number who say they have no party that represents them. There were grandmothers afraid of the future for their loved ones, parents ditto, plus young people, and not a single one was worried about being called racist. They went knowing Antifa might be there, and be violent. They all knew what they were worried about, and it transcended all else.
And if anyone thinks we shouldn’t be worried, Google Green Lane Mosque Birmingham, Despatches – it should be compulsory viewing. It also addresses the Burka ban – in that parents were told that if their daughters refuse to wear the hijab at 10 years old, they should be beaten until they did. I would imagine the same applies to the Burka as they get older.
An easier way to see the full video is to Google Israelvideonetwrk.com – What is really happening in Mosques across the U.K.
And bear in mind,this is 2007.
John the MSM work for those in power. You cannot ‘manage’ them. They will always down outsiders. Hence the move towards social media in politics.
Stand for leader!
Seconded.